Re: Turning on savehist-mode by default

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2023 14:57:48 -0800
> Cc: sbaugh@catern.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> >> Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2023 11:01:22 -0800
> >>
> >> I didn't see any serious objections, so perhaps we could move forward
> >> with this proposal.  Eli, WDYT?
> >
> > There wasn't a compelling reason to turn it on, either.  "Other
> > programs save history" is not enough in my book.  Other programs also
> > have the equivalent of recentf ON by default, but we don't.
> 
> This is my reasoning:
> 
> Users these days will expect that their history is saved between
> invocations of Emacs, as most other programs do that (including
> e.g. bash and even many languages REPLs).  This customization is common
> in many starter kits, and is frequently recommended to beginners.  Not
> doing it is somewhat surprising and inconvenient.

Whether users indeed expect this is something I suggest to verify, by
polling.  What is the percentage of users who enable savehist in their
customizations?

> > One disadvantage that was never discussed is that if we turn it on by
> > default, we'd need to preload savehist.
> 
> I didn't check how it affects the size of a running Emacs.  The ELC is
> only around 12 KB here, FWIW.

Well, yes, it is not huge, but we shouldn't preload anything we don't
have to, because it's a penalty for everyone, even those who turn the
feature off.

> > All in all, I'm not sure we should do this.  Perhaps a more wide user
> > poll is in order.
> 
> I suppose we could ask people on /r/emacs, if that would help.

Yes, I think we should.  But this should be organized so that we will
know the fraction of users who turn this on, so we'd need to hear from
people who turn it on and from those who don't.